Postman

Postman is the world's most widely used API development platform, providing a comprehensive set of tools for designing, building, testing, documenting, and monitoring APIs. With over 25 million developers and millions of organizations using it worldwide, Postman has become the standard platform for API-related workflows across the software development lifecycle.

The Postman client application is the primary workspace for API development. It provides an intuitive interface for constructing and sending HTTP, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, and SOAP API requests. Request collections organize multiple related requests together, enabling documentation of complete API workflows and test suites for entire APIs.

Collections are the central organizing concept in Postman. A collection groups related API requests with their authentication configurations, example responses, documentation, and test scripts. Collections can be shared with team members through Postman workspaces, enabling collaborative API development where everyone has access to the same set of requests and documentation. Collection Runner executes all requests in a collection sequentially or in parallel, enabling end-to-end workflow testing.

Pre-request scripts and test scripts are JavaScript functions that run before and after each request, respectively. Pre-request scripts can set dynamic variables, generate authentication tokens, and modify requests based on environment state. Test scripts use Postman's assertion library to validate response status codes, headers, body content, and response times. These scripts transform collections from simple request catalogs into automated test suites.

Environments in Postman store sets of variables that can be referenced in requests using double curly brace syntax. Environment switching enables the same requests to be executed against development, staging, and production environments by simply changing the active environment.

Postman Flows is a visual programming interface for building multi-request API workflows. Flows connect requests in a data flow graph where each request output feeds into subsequent requests, enabling testing of complex API orchestration scenarios without writing JavaScript.

Newman is the Postman command-line runner that allows running Postman collections in CI/CD pipelines, enabling automated API testing as part of every build and deployment workflow. The Postman API governance features include API linting, design-first development tools, and a centralized API repository for organizations implementing API-first development practices.